Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America by David J. Silverman (review)

David J. Silverman, a specialist in the history of the Native American peoples of early New England, here vastly expands his range, synthesizing and reinterpreting a remarkable amount of historical literature to impose a new variable on our understanding of how Indians around North America reacted to the arrival of guns and made them key tools in their self-fashioning, self-defense, and empowerment. Chapter 1 shows how the Iroquois recognized the greater lethality of muskets over bows and reoriented their hunting and trading to exchange furs for guns, gaining a critical advantage over their neighbors. This argument sets the tone for most of the chapters that follow. "Differential access to guns" empowered certain Indians over others (p. 8). Maintaining that advantage became a key objective for the favored group, who then manipulated the "gun frontier" to secure access to other sources (p. 18). For as long as a group maintained that differential access, they remained regionally ascendant; as other groups gained arms, they became more difficult enemies. Silverman demonstrates how the succession of peoples subjected to Iroquois raids was primarily a function of proximity and of how well armed they were. The Iroquois shifted the target of their raids to less well armed enemies until they found themselves raiding peoples on the Mississippi River. Silverman here seems to offer an updated version of George T. Hunt's old argument in The Wars of the Iroquois: A Study in Intertribal Trade Relations (Madison, Wis., 1940) about the Beaver Wars, that the Iroquois stepped up the aggressiveness and range of their raids for economic advantage, and not just to take captives and restore their population. What Silverman emphasizes, however, is that the Iroquois prioritized guns and that guns, in turn, enabled everything from individual martial success and self-defense to political and military influence.

The succeeding chapters mostly continue in this vein. Chapter 2 follows Alan Gallay's The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, 2002) to narrate how the southern English colonists' pursuit of Indian slaves led them to arm Indian slave raiders, again creating differential access to guns and successively empowering one group after another. Silverman emphasizes that guns were the trade item that mattered and motivated. Access to guns did not start King Philip's War, but many of Philip's eventual allies joined his cause when the English tried to restrict that access. Philip lost, Silverman argues, when the Mohawks pushed Philip's forces away from arms suppliers on the Hudson River. In this case, the gun frontier broke down as alternative sources of powder and lead dried up. In most of Silverman's narratives, especially chapters 4 and 6 on Pontiac's War and the Seminole Wars in Florida, he shows how Indians creatively manipulated the gun frontier to maintain arms supplies. Indians did not lose their wars because they lacked guns or powder, but because they were swamped by European demographic expansion and crippled by disease. In this respect, chapter 5, on the international gun frontier created by Chinese demand for sea otter pelts from the Pacific Northwest, is a bit of an outlier. Various European nations competed to supply guns in exchange for pelts and in doing so empowered one group over others. In this case, overhunting sea otters sparked the relatively rapid collapse of the gun frontier. The final two chapters move to the midcontinent and the penetration of the gun frontier well in advance of a significant European presence. Again, the story is one of differential access—often through Indian middlemen—and at least temporary empowerment.

This is a remarkable book with a remarkably consistent story. In each case Silverman successfully marshals evidence showing how the prioritization of guns and powder drove Indian decisions and set up one people or another to become a regional...